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Had she lived, Benazir Bhutto would probably have been her country's Prime Minister for an unprecedented third time — but she was a divisive figure despite that. To her friends and intimates, she will always be remembered by her nickname, Pinky. To millions of supporters, she was the inheritor of her father's political legacy and his Pakistan People's Party. To millions of others, she was a brazen opportunist — a onetime idealist warped by ambition. Bhutto's posthumous memoir, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West, will do little to change those ingrained opinions.

At times choppy and repetitive, Reconciliation reads more like a draft than a finished work — testament perhaps to an editing process curtailed by the death of its author on Dec. 27. But as such, it is a strangely apt memorial to an incomplete life. Jagged and harrowing references to the Oct. 19 bombing of her homecoming rally in Karachi, at which some 150 died, are inserted almost randomly into otherwise fluid prose that appears to have been written long before. The ubiquitous references to terrorism, however, underscore an important point. As a Muslim, a political leader and later a victim, Bhutto was uniquely poised to present an impassioned argument: namely, that the war we should all be worrying about is not that between Islam and the West, but between moderate and fundamentalist Islam.

Bhutto treats the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as personal affront, one that "twisted the values of a great and noble religion and potentially set the hopes and dreams of a better life for Muslims back a generation." Muslims, she says, "became [al-Qaeda's] victims too." For the first half of the book, she attempts to reclaim the religion from the fundamentalists who would use it for political advantage, explaining how the original concept of jihad, meaning a personal struggle "to follow the right path," had been appropriated for the purposes of inspiring resistance to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She puts the treatment of women as described in the Koran into context, demonstrating how, at the time of Islam's founding, such policies were revolutionary and far more progressive than those practiced by Christian and Jewish societies. Islam's problems, she contends, only began with the calcification of its progressive traditions in the 15th century, when the religion was reduced to a tool to consolidate the power of the Ottoman Empire.

Her call for a resurrection of ijtihad — the Islamic legal tradition of critical thinking — is a yearning for a return to the progressive origins of her religion. Were she alive at the time of publication, this alone would have seen her charged with blasphemy in fundamentalist circles, but if ever the Koran's message of tolerance bears repeating, it is now. Bhutto's criticism of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory is also pertinent. Huntington posited, in a 1993 essay in the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations magazine Foreign Affairs, that conflict between Islam and the West was inevitable. Bhutto, drawing on the works of several authors, argues that Huntington's idea "has actually helped provoke the confrontation it predicts ... The clash of civilizations theory is not just intellectually provocative: it fuels xenophobia and paranoia both in the West and in the Islamic world." But once again, she stresses that the ultimate cause of conflict is the tension that lies within Islam itself. It is the "failure to resolve that tension peacefully and rationally" that could "degenerate into a collision course of values spilling into a clash between Islam and the West."

Bhutto's solutions seem simplistic. She calls, platitudinously, for an end to dictatorship in Pakistan, as well as greater economic investment, better education and a "reconciliation corps" of cultural ambassadors modeled after the American Peace Corps program. While no one will deny the importance of such moves, they fail to tackle the fundamental schism of which she writes. Successful ambassadors of moderate Islam can be found all over the world, yet few seem able to stand up to extremism with any kind of vigor.

Bhutto's revisionist account of her political life — echoing the style of her earlier memoir, Daughter of the East — airbrushes out other unpleasantries that call for a deeper examination. Significant charges of corruption are dismissed as politically motivated, and her government's early support of the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan is forgotten. Her insistence that 3 million supporters thronged the streets of Karachi to greet her return from exile strains credibility, especially as most journalists and observers have put that number, by the most generous estimates, at 300,000. Most egregious however, are her overwrought descriptions of the terrible blast that same night. Her claim to have heard the faint cries of "Jeay Bhutto" — "Long live Bhutto" — from the wounded as they lay dying in the streets smacks of cheap political mythmaking.

Those passages, at least, are over quickly, and now that Bhutto has herself been slain by extremists, one hopes that she can be remembered for her honest effort to understand and influence the future direction of her religion, if not for her honest governance. As her posthumous words show, the tragedy of Bhutto's death is not so much in the loss of a great leader for Pakistan — her record as Prime Minister is hardly to be emulated — but in the silencing of a passionate advocate of moderate, contemporary Islam.

• Aryn Baker